“That’s a nice man,” she said decidedly. “Won’t you marry him, mammy?”
Her mother colored at such unexpected divination of her own projects.
“What odious things you say, Boo,” she answered; “and how odiously you behaved, asking for things in that bare-faced way. I have told you fifty times never to ask.”
“I shouldn’t have got it else,” replied Boo, calmly and unmoved, taking the Cupid out of the pocket of her fur paletôt, and contemplating it with satisfaction. She had improved in the science of looting since the day when her mother had made her give back the gold box to Mrs. Massarene.
As the carriage drove along the sea-road Vanderlin returned to the solitude of his library.
It had been unwelcome to him to be obliged to entertain them, and yet now that they were gone he momentarily missed them, the gay bright presence of the child and the graceful nonchalance in speech and movement of the woman. It was years since either child or woman had been in the rooms of Les Mouettes.
The days passed and brought her no recompense whatever for her self-inflicted immersion in the cold January waves. The boat had been found and restored to its owner, so it did not cost her very much. But the sense of failure irritated her exceedingly. Boo importuned her several times to return to the château of the silver dogs, but only encountered a sharp reprimand and was scolded for effrontery. The Cupid had been taken away from her and found its home in her mother’s dispatch-box till it was sent as a wedding-gift to somebody who was being married in the fog in Belgravia. Boo resented the injustice bitterly and meditated compensation or revenge. More than once she was on the point of starting by herself for Les Mouettes, but it was far off, her feet would not take her there, and she could not get away in a boat because her governess or her maid was always after her. “If I could only get there alone he’d give me a lot of things,” she thought; she could see the promontory on which it stood some five miles off to westward. But she had to stay in Cannes, and be walked out by her women, and play stupid games with little Muscovite princesses, pale and peevish, and little German countesses, rustic and rosy. Mammy took little notice of her. “She’s always nasty when she’s got no money,” reflected Boo.
Boo knew that there was a scarcity of money.
One day, as she was walking with her governess, which she hated, she saw two gentlemen on the other side of a myrtle hedge. She kissed her hand to one of them and rushed headlong to where a break in the hedge enabled her to join them.
“Good morning!” she cried, rapturously throwing her arms about Vanderlin. He looked down at her, surprised at such a welcome.